I’ve started writing up my goals for May because I seem to have a thousand things to do but I just forget about all of them, especially goals that don’t have a set deadline because they often don’t go into my BB and I don’t remember that I wanted them done until I have a new mountain of things to do.

If I was a dragon, I would be hoarding unfinished task lists.

We’re already halfway through May but because I decided that I wanted to use it to get as much work done as I can before June rolls around, I might as well make a mid-month goals list. I’m thinking that I’m going to make monthly goals list a habit too so that at the end of each month I can reflect on how productive I’ve been. It’ll be like the weekly reflections I already do but focus on tasks outside of my words written.

Mid-Month May Goals

For May, I’ll be looking at wrapping up a lot of tasks that I haven’t over the past few months and sorting out other aspects of my writing process and wrapping them up before June comes and I start my June Focus Project.

• The Culling

I want to clean up my writing OneDrive and cull all of the older projects that have no substance and I’ve basically grown out of them. I want to re-sort them based on my new archives and really think about the motivations for each in terms of “am I writing this for me?” and “am I writing this for others?” so I can sort them for their potential of submission.

The overall goal is to have my archive updated, the potential of works assessed and the OneDrive overhauled to reflect these new changes and make it easier to navigate.

• Transferring

I want to start migrating most of my projects into Scrivener because that’s where I’m working for my writing projects (excluding uni work) from now on. I really love the way Scrivener works but transferring my projects in to benefit from the different abilities it has is going to take some time because it’s not as simple as Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Those that have been assessed to have high ‘potential’ or ‘engagement’ will likely be on the list to be transferred. I have 10 on my list at the moment, and I want them all transferred before the end of May.

The overall goal is to complete the transfer of a list of works I’ve put together that I think are most likely to be background focus projects (the projects I work on even if they’re not the ‘monthly focus’, like The Demon’s Secretary).

• Editing

I haven’t done as much editing as my notes/tasks/schedules are screaming at me… because I haven’t done any at all. I think sometimes I’m afraid of editing my work in case the excitement of finishing it is just destroyed by the work being actually garbage. I’m working on that though, and I’m definitely getting better at the ‘just get it down, the first draft is allowed to be utter trash’ idea.

The overall goal is to get together all of the works that I’ve completed and start the editing process or at least prepare for it. For editing, I usually have a list of the sections of the work, notes on what needs to be altered and a numbered checklist for when I’ve gone through them and how many times. I have three pieces that I’m ready to start editing and two others that are currently in the editing process. I want to prepare for their edits (including timeline) and start at least 2 of them before June.

• Preparing for 2021

I haven’t done any submission to competitions like I planned because the pandemic kind of created a huge mess out of life, but I’m planning on using what I gathered about the different kind of submissions and competitions to sort of start preparing and polishing things to submit in 2021. Of course, many of them have themes that I can’t predict, but it will still be good to practice writing short pieces and to theme.

The overall goal is to get back on track with these plans and actually start them. It’s also going to be a lot of thinking about my writing future once I graduate at the end of the year and what I can do next year to help my professional goals. It’s likely to include a lot of reflection as well.

Those are my main writing goals for the remainder of May (that don’t include my words written goals). There will probably be smaller goals intertwined with these but these are the overarching goals that I want/need to hit before June belts into me. With everything up in the air amidst the pandemic, I need to discipline/structure myself better. Especially considering a second wave is not unlikely with how quickly restrictions are easing and how quick people are to ignore and protest them in the first place.

It’s halfway through May so I have half a month to hit as many of these as I can, otherwise, I’m going to have a sad reflection at the end of it. Better late than never, right?

I got this. Let’s write.